Hardware hacking at home

Yesterday, in the evening, I had already moved my old computer, a Compaq
Presario SR1505 LA, out of the way, to make place for the brand new
Dell Vostro 200 Slim Tower, which had arrived the 19th of February. And
today I had planned for installation of Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop (AMD64) on it.

Before I moved the Vostro in place, I first made a close-up photo of the CPU fan, to show on
this website that despite it being connected at an angle to the heatsink,
the fan is screwed securely in place.

Talking about heatsinks, when I opened the old computer to clean it, I noticed that
the heatsink was no longer in place on the "North Bridge", a SiS760, due to a missing clip on the Asus K8S-LA (Salmon)
motherboard. With a quick hack, involving tie wraps, I was able to get the heatsink back in place
so I could download the ubuntu-7.10-desktop-amd64.iso I needed to install Ubuntu on the Vostro.

While utorrent was downloading the iso, I had an, as somewhat expected, fruitless chat with HP/Compaq
on the problem at hand, and decided to fix the heatsink issue myself later on.

In the evening, after I had added a new "clip" to the Asus motherboard, and put the heatsink back into
place - cleaned, together with Esme, and with fresh thermal grease - I also fixed a remote control
that had suffered from cheap, leaking batteries.